This invention relates to a method and system for electronically routing billing information to customers over a communications network using an open financial exchange communication protocol and more particularly to a method for enabling, in a bill payment and presentment system, mainframe application files to be reformatted into Internet streams and transmitted over an open communications network such as the Internet.
As evident by the prior art, there are different types of bill presentment and payment systems. For instance, U.S. Pat. No. 5,832,460 to International Business Machines Corporation (the “IBM patent”) discloses a system and method for electronically creating, presenting, paying and reconciling bills. More specifically, the IBM patent discloses a system involving a bill originator or service provider (such as gas, electric or telephone company), the bill payers or customers, and their respective banks, as well as an electronic bill presenter which is in electronic communication with all of these parties. The bill presenter sorts the bills from various originators and presents the bills for a selected customer to that customer who then in turn indicates to the bill presenter the bills that he or she wishes to pay and the amounts of payment. The bill presenter notifies the bill payer's bank and the bill originator of the desired payment. The bill payer's bank sends a message of payment to the bill originator's bank who informs the originator.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,699,528 to MasterCard International Incorporated (the “MasterCard patent”) discloses a bill delivery and payment system over a communications network. The MasterCard patent discloses a system comprising a plurality of payee computers which feed billing information into a bill capture device and server for formatting billing data into subscriber specific bill images over the Internet. In this manner, subscribers may obtain their respective billing information by using a web browser to access the server computer to view the images and pay his or her bills.
As disclosed in the MasterCard patent, an electric bill service company oversees the service and controls the server computer (and the bill capture device) and the communications capabilities which include affording Internet access and receiving the billing information from the payee computers pursuant to an agreed-upon protocol.
As can be appreciated by those skilled in the art, because of the different bill presentment and payment systems being developed and utilized and the desire to create an open and uniform but secure exchange of messages and information over the Internet which would facilitate and expand the use of electronic bill presentment and payment, as well as other financial transactions, such as stock transactions and trading, CheckFree Corporation, Intuit Inc. and Microsoft Corp. jointly designed the Open Financial Exchange (“OFX”) format which has itself evolved over time, providing an original release 1.02, and additional Releases 1.5.1, 1.6 and 2.0. The OFX is a completely open format designed for use on client/server systems utilizing the Internet. OFX is syntactically similar to HyperText Markup Language (HTML), featuring tags to identify and delimit the data, which allows it to evolve over time. Familiarity with the OFX format as disclosed in “Open Financial Exchange Specification,” Edition 1.5.1, Nov. 23, 1998, is assumed.
Even with the use of the OFX format there is still inefficiency and lack of uniformity in the market. In the current electronic bill payment and presentation (EBPP) environment, there are customer service providers or CSPs (also referred to as the “originators”) and biller service providers (BSPs) (also referred to as the “concentrators”). The CSP is a financial institution or a sponsor bank that initiates payment on behalf of its customers, such as financial institutions that offer telephone or bill payment services, or sponsor banks and credit counseling agencies that offer consumer debt management plans and payment services. The BSP is an institution that owns the business relationship with the billers or creditors being paid by the originator's customers. The BSP is responsible for reformatting the transaction details to meet the biller's accounts receivable requirements and to settle with the billers.
In the past, participants have connected via a point-to-point method via the Internet and since each CSP and BSP needs to connect with each other, they have set up different agreements with each partner. This, however, became extremely cumbersome for both BSPs and CSPs as new participants came into the market.
Seemingly in response to the need for a centralized switching facility, Chase Manhattan Bank, First Union National Bank and Wells Fargo Bank founded a company named Spectrum EBP, LLC, which is a bank-owned payment system utility that routes electronic bills and payments between billers and consumers. The Spectrum switch operates between biller service providers, which convert billing data into electronic form on behalf of billers, and consumer service providers, which deliver electronic bills to consumers. In the Spectrum system, the BSPs aggregate the billing files from billers and format them into industry standard OFX messages and transmit the files to Spectrum, which then validates the transactions and routes the bill to the appropriate CSP for posting on the consumers' computer screens. The consumers' electronic payment messages are transmitted from their CSPs and routed to Spectrum for clearing and settlement to the member financial institution.
Even with the Spectrum switching system, in today's OFX environment, electronic bill payment and presentation is typically conducted solely over the Internet through public communication lines using Internet security protocols. The present systems are still flawed due to their inability to utilize all information available and in particular mainframe application files in batch mode. There is therefore a need to provide for a network application which utilizes the OFX format and facilitates in an open environment the exchange or switching of electronic bill presentment summary information among CSPs and BSPs in an efficient, effective and functionally enhanced manner, but which also allows for both the utilization of mainframe application files and data, and the interexchange of such related information over both public and private lines.